So over on Roosh Valizadeh’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Return of Kings blog a gentleman named Blair Naso has penned a weird paean to Barbie (the doll, not the Nazi war criminal), suggesting that she is a perfect “inspiration” for girls today.
I suppose it isn’t all that shocking that the kind of men who frequent Return of Kings would be fond of an imaginary woman who doesn’t talk and can’t defend herself.
Naso starts off his post by ridiculing feminists for criticizing Barbie. In his mind, they’re just jealous:
For feminists, what bothers them is that Barbie is beautiful. Feminism is an ugly ideology that overtly seeks to glorify both inner and outer ugliness. …To them, Barbie represents a vile standard of beauty.
In Naso’s mind, Barbie is both a Nietzschean Übermensch (no, really) and the embodiment of a Greek goddess.
Barbie is an over-man to little girls. She transcends reality and inspires admiration. Like Theseus for the ancients and Batman for today’s boys, Barbie goes beyond what a normal person can do. Barbie is not a standard; she is an ideal. She inspires aspiration, not imitation. Barbie is the modern Aphrodite.
Here’s a famous statue of Aphrodite from back in the day. Despite being, you know, a literal goddess, her proportions are a bit more human than Barbie’s.
Naso really seems to have a thing for Barbie:
If characters like Indiana Jones are the apex of masculinity, then Barbie is the same for femininity. She is beautiful, intelligent, domestic, social, gorgeous, hard-working, wealthy, attractive, outgoing, healthy, confident, pretty, talented, lovely, has great tits and hair, accomplished, alluring, charming, elegant, unblemished, graceful, and committed to only one man.
Apparently Naso, like Barbie herself, hasn’t caught on to the blindingly obvious fact that Ken is gay. Also, what about Allan, Brad, Curtis, Todd, Steven, Darren, Derek, Kurt and Ryan? Everyone knows that Barbie is riding the smooth flat crotch area carousel.
As Naso sees it, it’s men, not women, who are the real victims of our “fascist beauty standards.”
Men have to grow muscle, which is a journey that is painful, expensive, and filled with misinformation. And if he’s under six feet tall, his chances with women are drastically cut no matter what his other characteristics.
Women on the other hand have to buy an exercise video and keep their hair long. I suppose make-up can be time-consuming, but fashion is not nearly as expensive as women like to claim.
And if some women develop eating disorders trying to live up to the beauty ideal, well, they have no one but their own inferior female selves to blame.
It would be both mentally and physically unhealthy for a man to obsess about achieving the impossible body of Beowulf. So if Barbie and Aphrodite inspire women to turn to unhealthy practices (like eating disorders or fad diets) in a way that He-man doesn’t to men, then what does that say about women?
Either it is a lie that strict beauty standards cause women to obsess at the risk of their own health, or it is manifest that women are mentally and emotionally inferior to men.
Anyone who really wants to be a hottie needs to work for it.
Both anorexia and fat pride are shortcut cheats to beauty. Mature adults achieve what they want through hard work.
Naso does acknowledge that beauty standards are more “stringent” today. In a spectacularly ludicrous leap of logic — the intellectual equivalent of Evel Knievel’s famously failed jump over the Snake River canyon — he blames this on … ugly women.
My guess why beauty standards are a little more demanding today than they were 100 years ago is because today women are ugly. They are overweight, they have bad hair, they lack social grace, and they think hideous products are fashionable by sole virtue of their popularity. Women and little girls know this instinctually and over-correct through their fantasies.
Perhaps little girls love Barbie and Ariel so much because they see how frumpy mommy and their teachers at school are.
And it is the evil feminists who are keeping these little girls from living out their over-corrected fantasies dreams.
Women just want to be beautiful and have a beautiful life. Barbie gives them the inspiration to achieve their dreams. Then feminism sweeps along and tells them to remain stagnant.
In case anyone here needs inspiration, this song should help.
@proxieme:
Great piece. But the comments… Ugh. So predictable, and so illustrative of the author’s points.
“If characters like Indiana Jones are the apex of masculinity, then Barbie is the same for femininity. She is beautiful, intelligent, domestic, social, gorgeous, hard-working, wealthy, attractive, outgoing, healthy, confident, pretty, talented, lovely, has great tits and hair, accomplished, alluring, charming, elegant, unblemished, graceful, and committed to only one man.”
So, what is the difference between beautiful, gorgeous, attractive, pretty, and lovely?
@Swales I agree too, and it’s why Naso is dead wrong about why little girls love Barbie. It’s not because she provides welcome eye-candy relief from their ugmo moms and teachers (wtf?). It’s because developmentally, they’re learning about how the world works. Barbie allows them to act out their fantasies of what adult life will be like. They get to “play house” and have cool clothes and accessories and a car, and hang out with friends, and surf or fly around on airplanes or sing in a band or whatever flavor of Barbie is. Yes, it’s a denatured, superficial, girly version of the adult world, and the consumerist aspect is troubling, but there are way worse dolls out there (Bratz, anyone?)
The MRA obsession with height never fails to amuse me. Guys, seriously, I’m barely 5’8″ (a hair under 173cm) and I always did just fine. Maybe your problem isn’t that you aren’t 6’5″, but rather that you are an asshole.
“You put on 500 pounds of muscle, but you were only able to carry 100 pounds back to the wagon.”
(When am I going to stop making that joke? Never. The answer is never.)
@Buttercup “Math is hard!”
@katz:
W… where did the rest of it go? O_O
I’ll admit I played with Barbie as a kid… but never as heroine.
Really, she almost always played an evil corporate interest taking advantage of/capturing/being a general nuisance to the mixed herd of horses, beanie babies, and rubber reptiles.
The heroes were almost always my favorite rubber cobra, Sly the beanie-baby fox, and Alida (my pretty unicorn mother of adorable little spunky Elidor). Alida was the best, for sure.
Later on I got some dolls with real proportions and movable parts (THANKS BREYER) and the blacksmith and vet ended up almost always being good folks.
…Thinking back on it, little me might have been a kind of awful kidlet, because I’m pretty sure Barbie was always the villain only by dint of my little kid head knowing there was something…off… about her.
Not really proud of that part, to be honest. Glad I noticed there was something wrong about her, for sure, but the singling her out as evil because of it? Not so much.
I honestly don’t have a particular dislike of Barbie either (I still have something of a soft spot for dolls, actually). That being said, I do completely understand where the criticism comes from. Though toy companies are increasingly trying to package their dolls with “you can do it” type messages, it’s still overwhelmingly the case that boy and girl toys are very explicitly gendered, and while boys’ Legos or action figures emphasize action and what the characters are doing (driving cars, fighting bad guys, etc.), girls’ dolls emphasize primarily fashion. I’d argue Barbie herself shouldn’t get all the blame, but she’s the most egregious example of a larger issue. Lauren Faust created My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic because she wanted to prove a “girls’ show” could be successful as something other than hyper-feminized consumerism (the “fanbase of all ages and genders” took a darker turn than she could’ve anticipated, but still, she did succeed), and they made Equestria Girls. American Girl, for all its
Fifth Avenue posh branding, was a highly educational franchise committed to positive messages and tackling historical issues like child labor and suffrage, and Pleasant Company
got rid of the very thing that set it apart from other lines by retiring Historical Characters.
The “Math is hard” doll was back in the ’90s, but more recently, there was that “I Can Be a Computer Engineer” controversy. So it’s debatable how much Barbie has really gotten better.
All I could think about is how much blow-up dolls often resemble Barbie… The way he waxes poetic about a plastic “lady” that doesn’t talk and has mega tits means he must be sexually attracted to this beautiful, gorgeous, attractive, pretty, lovely, alluring, elegant, unblemished creature. Regardless of how legit this dude is, my theory is that he waxes on about Barbie to legitimize his fetish for (blow-up) sex dolls.
I like how Naso thinks women these days have bad hair, compared to those women in Ancient Greece who had no shampoo or showers.
For Naso I would wear my hair like one of those troll dolls.
@Swales – You’re right although I never thought of it that way.
FWIW, when we played Barbies in my neighborhood, Ken got thrown over for G.I. Joe whenever we could get him away from my friend’s brothers. But, just as often, we ended up pulling Joe’s head and limbs off and putting them back on where they didn’t belong.
Hey! Somebody has tumbled David!
The lady formerly known as JudgyBitch has written this:
http://tinyurl.com/nzh7zel
It’s a bit lame though. I guess rational people aren’t as interesting to lampoon as MRAs.
Interesting how the end of the “Barbie Girl” video looks strangely like a live-action version of the Sims — I think it’s pretty telling that it’s essentially Roosh’s vision of how reality should look. However, I suspect he’d just start complaining about how shallow, boring and useless women are…
NicolaLuna:“I hated Barbie when I was a little kid because she was nowhere near as cool as the teenage mutant ninja turtle action figures I’d *actually* asked Santa for. (Fuck you, Santa) … The only fun game I could play with Barbie was seeing how high I could get her stuck in a tree and then climbing the tree to get her back.
I was lucky: I lagged behind in maturity by 3-5 years, which made my 4.75-years-younger brother the perfect toy-obtaining playmate, and only our extended family sent me the super-feminine stuff. So I politely set the little-girl makeup kits, Barbie clothes, etc. aside and we had fun dismembering the Barbie-type dolls and using the parts to build cars we could race across the kitchen floor. Oh, and flexing the knee joint backwards (on the ones that bent at the knee) until it went pop. >;-) As the old saying goes, “don’t get mad, get even.”
paradoxicalintent: “Women’s fashion is fucking weird and expensive.”
You forgot ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘impractical.’ :-p Maybe it’s just my compact/muscular build or something, but I’m so miserable in today’s “women’s” clothing that I gave up and started buying secondhand jeans & bras on eBay a few years ago.
Jason Neuman said
Well, they’re all nothing like being lovely, alluring, charming, or elegant! And being outgoing has nothing to do with being social. Nuh-uh.
kirbywarp
I had a flashback to that scene from the Greed murder from Se7en. 0_0
A lot of people have brought up a lot of good done by Barbie, and you’re all right. Barbie is a way for kids to act out their fantasies that don’t revolve around motherhood.
But I really don’t think that the dudebros at RoK give two flying fucks about that. They just care if Barbie looks “bangable”.
@bodycrimes:
I turned that into a donotlink for you: http://www.donotlink.com/drxr
I personally prefer the donotlink service, as it’s a way to look at offensive web pages without giving them traffic.
Hey ParadoxicalIntention – thanks.
Mind you, it’s less offensive and more mindbogglingly petty and silly. Not to mention hard to read. But you’re right, she shouldn’t get traffic.
I think saying that David supports child porn is pretty offensive, and libelous, but let’s face it, libel is the reason she’s been banned from Twitter.
Though her listicle nonsense about halfway through the piece made me laugh because there’s enough projection there to open a chain of movie theaters.
Wait wait wait.
I went over there. I shouldn’t have: “Naso is from the Southern states but doesn’t have a funny accent.”
Well bless his heart.
@contrapangloss –
We all had Breyer horses in my neigh-borhood too! One of our biggest frustrations was that Barbie was too big for the Breyer horses. My childhood predated the Breyer humans, unfortunately 🙁
I also had more ‘clothes’ for my horses than for my Barbies. Mainly because I could sew horse blankets by hand.
There’s really not much to add at this point. We are now talking about a movement that says “Barbie is an over-man to little girls”.
The men’s rights movement already went past seeming like a Onion article long ago, but I never thought I’d read the sentence “Barbie is an over-man to little girls”.
I still like Barbie. I remember wanting them a lot as a girl in a 8 year old boys body. Not sure if the Return of the Kings crowd would help me much out then.
I’d like it if she (Barbie) got into a more human shape, stopped pretending to be bad at math, got some more diverse friends (cis and trans non-white lesbian Barbie gang, yeah!), and stopped pushing the capitalist narrative of getting bigger dream houses and giant cars.
So, he blames women for men’s poor body images and also women’s poor body images. He complains about how hard it is to look like He-Man, then turns around and makes fun of women for trying to achieve similar difficult ideals, which is something I’ve been noticing MRAs do about every problem that the sexes might have in common.
I absolutely LOVED Barbie as a child. As a teenager I realized she had been designed to look like a stereotypical male sex fantasy, which I admit I do find quite problematic. I enjoyed Barbie for exactly the reasons swales listed – playing with Barbie, Ken, Skipper and their friends allowed me to practice and dream about adult life. And I appreciate that it didn’t involve the typical marriage-and-babies push. But my niece is 4 years old and she doesn’t have any Barbies yet, and I’m very hesitant to be the one to introduce her. Though Barbie’s dream house still fills me with longing…
On another topic, anyone else notice how Barbie’s body has changed over the years? Last time I was in Target I noticed her boobs are much smaller than they were in the early 80’s. I googled and someone was complaining she’s been made to look like she has mild lordosis, which seems to be considered “sexy” these days. There was a photo of a naked Barbie and she does indeed look quite different.
I loved Barbie, she WAS my hero…I had her annual, I had a dress up box, I had about 15 dolls and also the horse range…
I still love Barbie. But she is also massively symbolic of the gender disparity that exists today…she’s awesome because she’s literally like a goddess, whereas Indiana Jones IS supposed to be human. The standards for men to aspire to are lower.
The writer of the article has terrible logic skills…he says either beauty standard pressure is a lie OR women are weaker…but doesn’t consider that perhaps beauty standards are more pressurised for girls, who are told that is THE defining feature of their lives (for me, it WAS until I was 18…literally. I had an epiphany that beauty wasn’t my life, and my self esteem is so much better for it.) whereas boys are told that they need to be big and strong…which are defined through actions, not passive states of being.
Men face standards, women are DEFINED by standards. Barbie is hot, and sucessful, but if she wasn’t hot, none of her other accomplishments would stand for anything in this sexist world.